Claimed By The Possessive Silver Wolf

Cora opened her eyes. A wave of dizziness slammed into her skull, making the world tilt violently. She squeezed her eyes shut again, waiting for the spinning to stop. When she opened them once more, her breath caught in her throat.

Giant ferns, the size of cars, blocked out the sky. Their fronds were a sickly, unnatural green, casting heavy shadows over the damp forest floor. The air was thick, humid, and smelled of wet earth and something else—something rotten and metallic.

This wasn't Yosemite.

Panic, cold and sharp, clawed at her chest. She patted her shorts pocket frantically, her fingers closing around the familiar smooth rectangle of her phone. She yanked it out, her thumbs fumbling to unlock the screen.

No Service.

The two words stared back at her, a digital death sentence. The signal bars were completely empty. She held it up to the canopy, waving it around like a lifeline. Nothing.

A tremor ran through her hands. She wasn't just lost. She was somewhere else entirely.

She forced herself to breathe. Panic wouldn't help. Panic never helped. That was what the self-defense instructor had drilled into them—breathe, assess, act. Three years of Krav Maga classes at the Midtown gym, plus that grueling wilderness survival camp her father had insisted on before her Yosemite trip—'You're going into the backcountry, Zhenzhen. You need to know how to start a fire, how to find water, how to stay alive'—and the ballet training that had sculpted her body since childhood. None of it had prepared her for this. Her amber eyes, a shade too warm for the harsh fluorescent lights of the practice room but perfect for the stage, scanned the alien landscape with growing dread. She was Cora, principal dancer of the New York ballet, and she had been in the middle of rehearsals for Giselle when the world had simply... shattered. One moment, the practice room mirror. The next, this nightmare of giant ferns and rotting air.

A violent rustle from the thick bushes to her left shattered the silence. The ground beneath her vibrated, a deep tremor that felt like a localized earthquake. Heavy footsteps. Thud. Thud. Thud.

Cora froze. Her survival instincts screamed at her to hide. She scrambled backward on her hands and knees, dirt scraping under her nails, until her spine hit the rough bark of a massive tree. She pressed herself against it, holding her breath, and slapped a hand over her mouth to stifle the sound of her ragged breathing.

The bushes parted.

A beast stepped out. It looked like a saber-toothed tiger on steroids. It was the size of a delivery truck. Its fur was a matted, dirty orange, crisscrossed with old scars. Two massive fangs, each as long as Cora's arm, curved down from its upper jaw, glistening with thick, viscous drool.

The tiger beast swung its massive head. Its nostrils flared, inhaling the air. Then, its huge, slitted pupils locked directly onto the tree where Cora was hiding.

A roar